The best succinct + fun weekly newsletter to learn about all the best things you need to know across tech, startups, VC, AI, etc, sent out every Monday. (and at the minimum, it will include the links I post about every week on instagram!). Feedback? Things I should add? Respond back here or comment below x
extra chaotic few weeks as we get ready to push out our new startup scouting product. if you’re in your job hunt, get a preview here and/or sign up to give feedback + share your job seeking woes here!
<3
Every week I highlight a few of my favorite startups that I personally think are really promising. They’ve typically received funding that week + are hiring, and occasionally I’ll include some special bonus ones.
And now you can easily earn some cold hard cash 💰: you can now use Shortlist (a fun product my company has been building) to earn $$ (anywhere from $5K to $30K) for successfully referring people to top startups. The brilliant part about this is:
you don’t even need to know the person who’s ultimately hired - if you post a link on LinkedIn and the algorithm shows it to someone who ultimately clicks the link and is hired, you get the $$$ 😏
all of these companies are great and highly respected, so your friend (or random person who saw your post) will also thank you 😉 win win
(PS are you a founder or do you work at a cool startup that’s hiring? reply back with the name so we can give you guys a shout!)
This week’s featured companies:
SambaNova: A custom chip company building inference-specific architecture that promises 3x lower cost than GPU-based systems, with JPMorganChase as a named enterprise inference partner. The company raised a $1 billion Series F at an $11 billion valuation led by General Atlantic.
Job openings can be found here
Kaon: An AI entertainment platform that lets users create personalized interactive story worlds and characters. The Berkeley-based company raised $60 million from investors including B Capital.
Job openings can be found here
Oratomic: A quantum computing company developing technology aimed at running Shor’s algorithm for practical large-scale computation. The Pasadena-based startup raised a $300 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Job openings can be found here
Some bonus companies that were also funded last week:
Fleek (AI secondhand clothing) 👗 → $25M Series B (Job openings here)
Pearl Health (Medicare value-based care) 🏥 → $110M Round (Job openings here)
Agave (construction accounting AI) 🧾 → $15M Series A (Job openings here)
Databento (market data infra) 📊 → $97M Series B (Job openings here)
All the best things I’ve read this week
The End of Reading Is Here by Rose Horowitch (The Atlantic): gambling is now more adopted than reading (57% of Americans placed a bet in the last year 38% that read a novel/short story).
i couldn’t find this ‘letter from the editor’ in Tablet Magazine online anywhere (someone more internet savvy than me: correct me if I’m wrong) but my bf gets a lot of magazines delivered (and never reads them 🤪 and i’ve taken it upon myself to read them so they don’t go to waste).
i really liked this letter, about how obsessing over politics is sometimes a distraction from actually doing the work to make one’s community better (especially one’s local community). if you’ve struggled with this (ie wanting to be informed but also feeling enraged daily but also feeling like you can’t really do anything but also like you can’t stop) i think you’d also like Meditations for Mortals (a book i love / mention frequently on my page that has a really interesting chapter on this topic as well).
All the most important things that happened last week, from intellectual to guilty pleasure and optimistic to cringe:
Apple sued OpenAI: Apple accuses two ex-employees now at OpenAI of systematically stealing confidential data on unreleased hardware, specs, and supply-chain vendors. OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io Products are named as defendants. Some of the crazier accusations:
Hardware chief Tang Tan allegedly used Apple’s internal codenames to pry info out of Apple employees interviewing at OpenAI — and told them to bring “actual parts” (batteries, logic boards) to interviews for “show and tell.”
Apple says OpenAI circulated an internal Apple document among new OpenAI hires + coached new hires on dodging exit security checks
400+ former Apple employees now work at OpenAI
Two frontier models shipped 24 hours apart: Grok 4.5 and GPT-5.6
Under-discussed note: Washington now gates US model launches. GPT-5.6 only went public after a 13-day, government-coordinated preview. The Commerce Department’s AI standards center had to clear wider access.
SK Hynix’s Nasdaq debut: memory is the whole economy now
Raised $26.5B — the largest US share sale ever by a foreign company, beating Alibaba’s 2014 record.
Popped ~13% day one. Second-largest US share sale in history, trailing only SpaceX’s $86B IPO last month.
69% of Americans now want to seize half of AI companies’ stock - last week i shared the story about how openai was proposing donating 5% of its equity to a US soversign wealth fund and now a national survey from Verasight (1,690 adults) found 69% support “forcing” AI firms to transfer 50% of their stock to a public sovereign wealth fund.
This is tied to Bernie Sanders’ American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, introduced in June
Tech accounted for nearly a third of all US job cuts in H1 2026 (139,156 cuts, up 83% YoY (Challenger)).
Goldman estimates ~15 million workers could lose jobs over a 10-year AI transition.
Chinese models are taking up to 46% of US enterprise token traffic - I shared in the last few weeks that Chinese models were gaining market share (especially because they run 60-90% cheaper).
CNBC dug into OpenRouter data and found the share of tokens US companies routed to Chinese models has stayed above 30% every week since February 8, peaking at 46%. (This compares to 11% average over the prior year, and just 4.5% in H1 2025.)
[new experiment!] every week I want to highlight cool projects, opportunities, fundings, etc from this community! these are free and are curated for things that are the most helpful/inspiring/interesting for other members of this group. for more context and to submit any cool projects etc, please see here! (they’ll be reviewed on a rolling basis every Sunday(ish))
(Please note a feature here is not an explicit endorsement unless specifically stated — I do light diligence but given time/resource constraints, am not doing rigorous diligence (so please do your own research before spending lots of time and money, etc.)
a very cool kickstarter + app launches tomorrow (7/14)! Paprclip by Kyle Fraser. Paprclip is a shared habit tracker with Snapchat-like features (amazing for someone like me where peer pressure is by far the most effective thing that owrks). Support the kickstarter here + sign up for the waitlist/app here!
congrats to Speakeasy for raising $8.8MM led by Positive Sum (founded by Alex Manavi): bootstrapped to profitability + grew 500% YoY in 2025! “We are at the intersection of intelligence, infrastructure, and an all-in-one payments, booking, and operating system for leading live experience enterprises… We are a prime example of using AI to accelerate product development velocity, internal operations, and intelligence through a data-first approach in an industry that is fundamentally an AI derivative - an AI hedge centered around IRL experiences. Historically, this has been a severely underserved market from both a product and technology perspective.”
aka random things that I found interesting enough to screenshot or take a picture of last week
the title of this article “It’s Humiliating. It’s Exhilarating. It’s a Line.” is perfect. (My friends and I passed by the Myka line last Thursday eve naively expecting that a 10PM drop in would be more manageable and we couldn’t be more wrong. FWIW we did ask 4 different groups who had gotten their ice cream whether it was worth it and all of them described it as “meh” - ie delicious beacuse it’s froyo but not worth 30+ minutes in line).
if you’re interested in the study of / history of mental health, you might also really like this book! i’m halfway through and really enjoying it (ty to my college + psychiatrist bff Catherine for the rec!)
weekly shiba content (they’re frenemies and rarely cuddle, so this was a noteworthy capture):
<3 until next week!
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